Discussion Topics for Today's Classroom

Will tech firms challenge China’s ‘open’ internet?

China has been smart and ruthless in its control of the internet within its borders. It blocks some foreign sites altogether and it censors – heavily – what Chinese are allowed to see. Nonetheless the big idea at this gathering is openness. There wasn’t much openness about the “great firewall” that keeps out Twitter, Facebook, Google and the New York Times to name a few.

1) The internet was designed to allow traffic to route around roadblocks or failures in the network (the device doing this is called a router for that very reason). Is it really possible for a country the size of China to block internet traffic?

2) How might a company such as Twitter or Facebook work around this internet-blocking issue?